Author: Rosemary Pardoe

Works

British writer Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) is the most influential author of ghost stories in literary history, but his work has not received the attention it deserves. Warnings to the Curious, the first volume on James to be devoted entirely to his ghostly fiction, features a wealth of material old and new about the scholarly author and his supernatural writing. The volume opens with memoirs of James by such friends as Stephen Gaselee and Shane Leslie, and early criticism by H. P. Lovecraft, Mary Butts, and others.

Simon MacCulloch contributes an exhaustive discussion of the theme of “forbidden knowledge” in James and Lovecraft, while such critics as Ron Weighell, David G. Rowlands, Jacqueline Simpson, and Steve Duffy probe specific aspects of James’s ghost stories. Studies of individual tales by such leading Jamesians as Helen Grant, Rosemary Pardoe, Martin Hughes, and Nicholas Connell…[more]